The Hero of Varay

by Rick Shelley

  “A word of advice?” Mother waited, and I didn’t object. “Be very certain of her before you try to explain.”

  I smiled. “I sort of figured that out, Mother. The fact is, I’m scared to tell her. I keep telling myself that she’ll think I’m crazy if I just tell her about it, and if I just take her through one of the doorways without any warning or explanation, it’ll scare her away, or make her think that she’s flipped out.”

  “I called Dr. McCreary last night.” There was a long silence before Mother said that.

  “No need to phony up a death certificate for me yet,” I said quietly. Hank McCreary was a Varayan expatriate living in Denver. After Dad’s death in Varay, McCreary signed a certificate saying that Dad died on a mountain-climbing expedition, an accidental death, body recovered, examined, and cremated.

  “No, but he’s also had experience treating Varayan medical problems. I didn’t know yet just how serious your injuries were, just that they were beyond my limits.” Mother was something of a doctor herself, up to a point. Doc McCreary had done most of her training. In a place like Varay, it doesn’t take much to be leagues above everyone else in medicine.

  “So, what, have you got him flying up here?”

  Mother shook her head. “I called him back after your doctor finished with you.”

  It wasn’t quite the reunion I had been looking forward to for the past three months. The location of my wound would have made that temporarily impossible even though I wasn’t in any great amount of pain. Parthet brought Joy in and then he left with Mother.

  Joy was all shook up, and I could see that she had been crying. She was still sniffling when she came into the room.

  “I’m okay, Joy, really,” I told her.

  She came over to the edge of the bed, but she seemed to be afraid to even touch me. I reached for her hand, and her instinct seemed to be to jerk away. And when we did hold hands, she didn’t want to put any pressure on me.

  “I’m not going to break into small pieces or start screaming in pain,” I said, patiently, not sarcastically—not with Joy.

  “He said you’ve got a big, long cut in your stomach.”

  “All sewed up, as secure as the seams of your jeans.”

  Joy didn’t know whether to laugh or sob. The sound that came out had a little of each in it.

  “Come a little closer,” I told her. She did and I finally pulled her down for a good kiss. There was nothing wrong with my mouth.

  Joy Bennett, the joy of my life. She went crazy whenever I made that kind of pun. After a year together, I couldn’t find many new variations. Joy was twenty-one, slender, five-three, and light enough that she never even got on a bathroom scale. Her waist was almost small enough for me to get my hands all the way around it and made the other measurements look more exaggerated than they were. Her hair was in that vague borderline range between dark blond and light brown. Her eyes were a bluish gray, the kind of eyes that thriller writers like to call “steely-cold killer’s eyes,” but there was nothing steely or cold about Joy’s eyes. Like me, Joy was something of a computer whiz, bending a natural talent to the rigors of formal training in college. At odd moments, I wondered if she would be able to step away from it cold turkey the way I did. The answer to that might be important.

  The strength of my kiss finally convinced her that I didn’t need to have FRAGILE stamped all over me. She relaxed and even managed to return the kiss with adequate warmth.

  “So what happened?” she asked after we finished a fitting welcome-back-after-three-lonely-months kiss. “And how come you were in Louisville getting in trouble when you were supposed to be in Chicago getting all hot and bothered while you waited to pick me up?”

  “I ran into a guy with a six-foot sword,” I said. She started laughing, but I pulled the sheet aside and showed her the length of the cut. Her face when pale when she saw the bandage and the drain hanging out and all, but after a moment some color came back to her cheeks and she moved the sheet to look down a little farther.

  “Just making sure,” she said. I stopped her when she reached down to touch me a few inches below the bandage. I didn’t want to press my luck yet. If I got an erection, it might lead to pain I didn’t need, and if I didn’t get one, I’d worry about it. Some complications are better avoided.

  “How long are you going to be in here?” Joy asked, transferring her busy hands to my chest and arms. I adjusted the bed to sit me up and she hopped up next to me—but carefully—when I patted the sheet. We got our arms around each other and kissed again.

  “A few more days, according to the doctor,” I said. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll have to wait for anything else. Not too much, I think.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I told her, but I was mentally knocking on wood. “I’m a resilient kind of guy, and I’ve been waiting three months to get home to you.”

  “This kind of thing happen to you often?” she asked. Joy had seen the scar on my back, where the spear got me while I was on the “rampage” in Fairy, and she had seen the spot where the compound fracture of the left leg I got when the dragon fell on me outside Castle Thyme had popped through the skin, and the various other scars I had picked up during those weeks. A Hero of Varay might heal quickly, but the healing didn’t do away with scars.

  “Not too often,” I said, pulling her close for another kiss. That seemed to be the best way to change the subject. I had told her that the scar on my back came from getting poked by a sharp stick—technically true, if evasive—and merely wrote the leg scar off as coming from a broken bone, without ever saying how I broke it.

  Mother and Parthet gave us a good long time alone together, and Mother knocked and waited before she came back into the room. Everything was decorous by then. Even if I had felt up to anything, I wouldn’t have tried it when I knew that Mother was in the hallway just outside the door.

  Joy spent every minute she could in the hospital with me. She snuck in before visiting hours started at noon and didn’t leave until the nurses chased her out after they ended—long after they ended. Mother and Parthet kept coming around. Lesh visited for a few minutes a couple of times, after he had what he considered a more suitable wardrobe, but everyone pretty much gave Joy and me all the time together we wanted.

  By the third morning after the operation, Dr. Barlow was talking to herself almost constantly—at least when she came in to check on my condition. I wasn’t just making a timely recovery, I was healing impossibly fast. The word “impossible” was finding its way into the doctor’s conversation about every other sentence. I declined her request to stick around long enough for her to run a few extra tests on me and I told her that I wouldn’t at all be happy to be part of a paper in the medical journal of her choice. Actually, I was somewhat more pointed about that, maybe a touch on the rude side. She didn’t come by to say so long when she signed my release that afternoon.

  Mother assumed, without asking, that I would want or need to stick around Louisville for a few extra days just to be sure that there weren’t any complications. Dr. Barlow wanted to see me in five days to check on her artwork, and so forth. But since I was doing fine at that point, I didn’t expect any later complications, and I didn’t plan to spend even one more night in Louisville. Joy and I had things to do back in Chicago—or just about anywhere but in my mother’s home.

  That gave me another slight problem, getting back to Chicago with Joy. The problem? My danger sense goes completely berserk if I even get near an airplane, any airplane. You can’t reason with magic. My danger sense didn’t give a damn about all of those statistics that claim that air travel is the safest kind. And Joy didn’t know about the magic passageways, so we couldn’t very well just pop through to my apartment that way, not without spoiling the mood, no matter how well Joy took the experience. And I couldn’t put Joy on an airplane and then pop through the doorway myself and beat her to Chicago.

  There was only one real solution to the dile
mma. No matter how much it disrupted my danger sense, we both had to take the airplane. Before we left for the airport, Uncle Parthet got me away from Joy long enough to tell me that he would make sure that my hardware got home safely. It wasn’t until then that I remembered that he had brought my elf sword through with us the night I was hurt. I couldn’t very well cart that along on the airplane.

  Joy and I took a late-afternoon flight. It’s only a short hop by air from Louisville to Chicago. We spent a lot more time on the ground than we did in the air, waiting for clearance to take off from Louisville, then getting from the runway to the terminal at O’Hare. The flight isn’t even long enough for a meal (for small blessings …) and just long enough for a single drink (that the doctor had said I shouldn’t try for at least two weeks).

  As I expected, my danger sense raised hell from the time I first saw our aircraft, and it kicked up such an extra fuss near the end of the flight that I was almost convinced that we were going to crash. The seat-belt sign had already gone on for the landing, but I put my arm around Joy and held her as tightly as I could under the circumstances.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I hate airplanes,” I whispered through clenched teeth. I hoped that there was nothing more to it than that.

  “You’re scared of flying?”

  “Just the takeoffs and landings.”

  There was none of the usual friendly chatter from the pilot during the last part of the flight, which added to my apprehension, but neither was there any kind of dire warning. Our approach felt a little too steep, a little too fast, but then, my danger sense didn’t like anything at all about the flight.

  Once we were on the ground, I knew that there had been something wrong, somewhere along the way. I could hear it in the pilot’s terse “Thank you for flying with us” speech and in the drawn faces of the stewardesses at the door as we left the plane and took the walk through the umbilical to the concourse. Once we were in the airport, the feeling of danger got as strong as it was that day when I opened the passage from Coriander to Arrowroot and felt the waves of danger flooding over me.

  “Something’s wrong,” I told Joy as I hurried her along the concourse to the main part of the terminal and the baggage-claim area. “Something is terribly wrong. I can feel it.”

  “What?” Joy asked, a little out of breath. She was having trouble keeping up with me, and I finally had to either slow down or pull her off her feet. Her “Gil, what’s the matter?” had an uneasy edge to it.

  “I don’t know yet,” I told her, “but it has to be something really big.”

  I didn’t give her time to question how I could “know” something like that, but it didn’t take us long to find out what it was. Airports try to shield passengers from unsettling news, but this was just too big. I heard talk, and pretty soon I heard official talk. People were clustered around several of those coin-operated televisions that they have in the waiting areas.

  The cruise ship Coral Lady had just been nuked by terrorists in Tampa Bay. A lot of people were dead. And panic was spreading faster than the mushroom cloud.

  3

  Red Pepper

  Despite my involvement with Varay, I like to think that basically I’m a rational, intelligent human being. Consequently, the eruption of one hostile nuclear device conjured up nightmarish fears of a mushroom salad being tossed all around the globe. It was as if Gorbachev and his reforms had never existed, as if the reforms in Eastern Europe had never begun. All of the years of scare tactics that went before remained too strong, too close to the surface of my memory. I was terrified, and so was everyone around me. Many of the people in the airport seemed to be literally scared stiff, too petrified to even move. When my danger sense gave me an extra nudge, I figured that it was a just a reaction to the fear all around Joy and me. A crowd of people in a panic is a mob, a dangerous place to be.

  For a few minutes, Joy and I stood and listened to the television reports along with a crowd of other rational, intelligent, terrified people. Hard facts were still scant. A “small” nuclear device had definitely vaporized the cruise ship Coral Lady, which may have been carrying as many as two thousand people, passengers and crew. The explosion had taken place, approximately, as the ship passed under the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, entering Tampa Bay. The extent of damages and casualties on shore wasn’t even being estimated yet. The TV news people were having trouble doing their work. Phrases like “This is just terrible” and “I can’t believe it” were getting in the way of reporting. The news people were as frightened as anyone else, and it was impossible to get reports from anywhere close to the center of the disaster. In the first spasm of official reaction, the military restricted all air space within a hundred miles of the site of the explosion, so reporters couldn’t even move in with helicopters to get tape of the disaster scene.

  After I collected the basic news—what little there was—I started to notice something even more frightening. Some people, on the television and in the crowd watching, refused to believe that the blast could have been an isolated act of terrorism committed by a small band of fanatics without some kind of governmental sanction and support. Calls for retaliation—against one group or nation or another—were already sounding. Different people had different ideas about who “must” have been responsible. The Soviets, Iranians, and PLO all had their accusers. There were a few instant arguments, one of which led quickly to a fistfight.

  Chicago didn’t feel like a very safe place to be just then. I started pulling Joy along again, away from the televisions … and away from the fight. No, I had no intention of getting involved or trying to stop it. I was “out of my jurisdiction,” as the saying goes.

  “What do we do?” Joy asked. She had to shout so I could hear her over the din in the terminal.

  “The first thing to do is get to my place. The biggest problem right now will probably be panic.” At least I hoped that there would be nothing worse than panic to cope with right away. That could be bad enough.

  “What if there are more explosions?” Joy asked.

  “One step at a time,” I said.

  We managed to snag Joy’s two suitcases from the baggage carousel, which was a major surprise in itself. Even without a major catastrophe in the news, recovering luggage right away is never certain. But there wasn’t a taxi or limo to be had outside the terminal. There were crowds of people waiting to mob any cab that did dare to drive up. The traffic cops and airport security couldn’t hope to handle that kind of action. There were no CTA buses in sight either.

  Joy and I went back inside and headed for the car-rental booths, but they were all swamped. We couldn’t get within ten yards of a counter. It was pointless to wait. There wouldn’t be a car left by the time we could get halfway through the lines.

  “How are we going to get out of here?” Joy asked. She was starting to sound a little panicky herself.

  I shook my head, but I was already pulling her along again. There was only one possibility left that I could think of, the El. If we could get aboard a train into the city, we could ride to within a mile of my condo, close enough to walk the rest of the way if we had to.

  The elevated was apparently the last route anyone thought of. Possibly a lot of out-of-towners didn’t know that there was a line running from the airport to the Loop, or they just weren’t geared to thinking of that kind of transportation. There was still a crowd waiting, but not as large as the crowds trying to rent cars or flag down taxis that weren’t there. Joy and I were able to move far enough through this crowd to squeeze aboard the first train.

  Squeeze. There was scarcely room for everyone to inhale at the same time. Not even a world-class pickpocket could have operated in that car. Our ride into the city was long, uncomfortable, and more than a little terrifying. Each stop brought the risk of a riot as some people inside tried to get out and more people outside tried to cram in. The stops weren’t long enough for passengers to get off if they weren’t already near a door, a
nd no one could move toward the doors until some of the passengers in front of them got off.

  By the time we got near the Loop, Joy and I were able to get out. We just took the first opportunity that came up, even though we were still quite a distance from my place. We had to walk for a few blocks then, but conditions weren’t nearly as chaotic in the city as they were out at the airport. In fact, things may have been calmer in the streets than usual. There were people out on the sidewalk talking to neighbors and strangers, everyone wondering what was going on, but more people must have been inside, glued to their televisions and radios. Eventually, we were able to flag down a cabbie who was still working, though he had a boom box on the front seat next to him and it was blasting out the news. When we pulled up at the entrance to the apartment building, I gave the cabbie a fifty and told him to keep the change. He almost smiled.

  There was no security guard on duty in the lobby, but I wasn’t about to call the building manager to complain about the lapse. Joy and I went right on through and had an elevator to ourselves. Still, the elevator seemed to move as slowly as if it had to stop at every floor between the lobby and thirty-eight.

  Once we were in my apartment with the door locked behind us, I started to relax, just a little. In the apartment, no matter what happened, we were only a few steps away from safety. I dropped Joy’s suitcases in the foyer and we stood there, just clinging to each other at first.

  “I’m scared,” Joy said, her voice muffled because she was talking half into my shirt.

  “Me too, a little,” I conceded, “but we’ll be safe now.” I still needed a couple of minutes to calm down to only halfway panicked myself. Scared? You bet. Hero or not, I was damn scared. With any luck at all, my danger sense would give us enough time to escape through one of my magic doorways even if an H-bomb was about to go off overhead. The danger sense worked just as well in the real world as it did in the buffer zone. But the fear was still there.